> when you can implement the vast majority of C++ features in native C
No, you absolutely cannot, even in principle. C++ is not "C with classes" and some syntactic sugar like it started out. That's not been the case for many years already.
Also, even the features you can implement - you won't; you don't have the person-years for that. You will have to, need to, use libraries. For those you need to compare the libraries available for C and for C++, and C comes up quite short (not just because C libraries are also usable in C++...)
So which feature can you not implement? The only I can think of which you'd have real problems are anonymous functions/lambdas. Most other features I think you can implement. It won't look the same, but it will serve the same purpose.
Destructors. It is the defining feature of the language; everything else in the language extends their reach. They are the key to full exercise of code paths, and thus reliable code.
A programmer who makes full use of destructors is simply a better programmer than one who doesn't.
No, you absolutely cannot, even in principle. C++ is not "C with classes" and some syntactic sugar like it started out. That's not been the case for many years already.
Also, even the features you can implement - you won't; you don't have the person-years for that. You will have to, need to, use libraries. For those you need to compare the libraries available for C and for C++, and C comes up quite short (not just because C libraries are also usable in C++...)